PM's Election Maps And Stuff Thread

[prime-minister]

I've been lurking a while because I haven't had any new content I felt like posting, but I want to get started doing it so here we go! I'll mostly be posting my maps here, as well as possibly some graphics and draft ideas for stuff if people are interested in that. I might also do some reposts from my dA or from the Other Place to get them all in one place.

Anyway, I wanted to kick off with something new, and I’ve wanted for ages to do a Taiwanese map, so thanks to some very nice resources on the Chinese Wikipedia I finally got round to doing one!

Taiwan is an island between China and Japan, and that’s about all you can say about it without getting into some kind of political hot water. The de facto government of the island is known as the Republic of China, and is the descendant of the nationalist regime which governed mainland China until towards the close of the Civil War, the Communists consolidated their power and pushed the nationalist forces onto the island of Taiwan. In a frankly absurd situation, the People’s Republic of China argues that Taiwan is part of China, and Taiwan agrees, but argues that it should govern mainland China and not the PRC.

Well, sort of. That’s the argument of most of the ‘Pan-Blue’ alliance, led by the Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese: 中國國民黨, Zhōngguó Guómíndǎng), under the 1992 Consensus allegedly agreed by the PRC and ROC governments. The KMT ruled China and then Taiwan as a one-party state from the 1920s to the late 1980s, mostly because while Sun Yat-Sen really didn’t like the communist ideology of the Bolsheviks, he did like the dictatorship part (not even joking about that). After the anti-government 228 Incident, the Kuomintang brutally consolidated its rule over the island of Taiwan through the White Terror, enacting martial law and aggressively suppressing dissidents for almost 40 years.

Repealing this and turning Taiwan into a functioning democracy was a slow and complex process, largely enacted by Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of longtime KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, during the former Chiang’s presidency from 1978 to 1988. These reforms came under pressure from the pro-democracy Tangwai (黨外) movement, which in 1986 gave rise to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, Chinese: 民主進步黨, Mínjìndǎng). The DPP's main ideological principles are liberalism and Taiwanese sovereignty, and despite spending its first six months as an illegal organisation, would ultimately manage to put significant pressure on the KMT to democratise the country, helping ensure reforms to make the Legislative Yuan and Presidency directly elected were enacted in the constitutional reform known as the Additional Articles of the Constitution.

The DPP would gradually gain strength over the course of the first decade and a bit of Taiwanese democracy thanks to fatigue with the KMT and particularly its corruption, culminating in 2000 with the victory of Chen Shui-bian in the presidential election leading to the first peaceful transfer of power in Chinese history. To support Chen, the ‘Pan-Green’ alliance was formed, comprising the DPP and allied left-leaning parties. Its emergence has led the ‘Pan-Blue’ and ‘Pan-Green’ alliances to form the backbone of Taiwanese democracy, with the KMT and DPP dominating their respective alliances but with allies holding seats of their own too.

Since 2008, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan has had a very mixed mixed-member proportional system. It elects 113 members, 73 through single-member districts elected by FPTP, 34 through a national constituency elected by party list PR (which overseas Taiwanese also vote on) and 3 each by the lowland and highland Taiwanese Aboriginals elected by bloc vote. Just to make things more confusing, the Pan-Blue and Pan-Green alliances frequently function in the single-member districts with parties standing aside for each other or for like-minded independents, but the list PR seats are a free for all (it’s a little like Japan in that regard actually).

In 2008 it gave a massive landslide victory to the Kuomintang after the DPP and the Taiwanese electorate had soured on President Chen for his alleged corruption which they defended in 2012. However, the KMT lost much of its popularity when it supported the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a trade pact with the PRC, in 2014; the Sunflower Movement, as the protestors against the CSSTA became known, gained popularity by arguing the pact would put Taiwan under political pressure from Beijing, and this became a catalyst for the Taiwanese left.

Aided by this discontent, the DPP won a strong victory in the local elections, and its party chair Tsai Ing-wen managed to build up a strong lead in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, helped by the KMT being in disarray, as it was forced to withdraw its nominee Hung Hsiu-chu for the overwhelming unpopularity of her ‘one China, same interpretation’ stance. She secured the DPP’s best ever result and with this came coattails that gave the DPP a majority in the Legislative Yuan for the first time.

Tsai’s government has quite actively pursued the DPP’s agenda, cushioned by its majority in the Legislative Yuan; perhaps its most well-known policy programmes internationally have been its vocal rejection of the Chinese political system of ‘one country, two systems’ and the 1992 Consensus, opposing Chinese reunification (at least on the current terms) and advocating for liberal Taiwanese nationalism, its support for the Hong Kong protesters and making Taiwan the first country in Asia to legally recognise same-sex marriage. It has also worked to support justice for Taiwanese indigenous peoples and reduction of unemployment and wealth inequality.

After first coming back to power the DPP initially appeared to be facing setbacks, culminating in badly losing the local elections in 2018, but Tsai’s support had strengthened again by the time of the 2020 election thanks to the Hong Kong protests and she won another landslide victory. The DPP won another majority in the Legislative Yuan, but with significant losses compared to its 2016 landslide, and despite its fairly well-regarded handling of the COVID-19 pandemic the DPP again suffered losses in the 2022 local elections, as well as facing recalls against members allied with the party.

As well as two independents, the DPP-friendly parties to be elected in 2020 were the New Power Party (NPP, Chinese: 時代力量,Shídài Lìliàng), a party formed from the Sunflower Movement which acts as a more left-wing alternative to the DPP outside of its coalition a little similarly to the Korean Justice Party, and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TPP, Chinese: 台灣基進,Táiwān Jījìn), an independentist ally of the DPP.

The KMT’s traditional ally inside its coalition, the People First Party (PFP, Chinese: 親民黨, Qīnmín Dǎng) led by James Soong (who ran as an independent in 2000 and almost won), was shut out of the Legislative Yuan for the first time since its founding, but the centrist Taiwan People’s Party (TPP, Chinese: 民眾黨, Mínzhòngdǎng), founded by independent former Mayor of Taipei Ko Wen-je the previous year, took five list seats.

 

[prime-minister]

I just remembered two maps I had lying around to share. So Ireland is obviously known for being the most prominent country in the Anglophone world (if you count it as such) to not use FPTP, but perhaps unsurprisingly, during one of Fianna Fáil's periods of dominance in the late 1950s and 1960s, it made a considerable effort to replace the STV system which made it harder for the party to win overall majorities in the Dáil. Both of these were voted down by the Irish electorate at referendums 9 years apart.


The 1959 referendum came very close to passing despite the steadfast opposition of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and basically everyone outside FF. It was most likely helped by the proposed Third Amendment advocating a nonpartisan Commission be in charge of drawing constituencies rather than the Oireachtas and the fact it was held on the same day as the presidential election where Éamon de Valera won his first term. The latter can be particularly clearly seen when comparing the stronger vote for Dev's opponent, Seán Mac Eoin, in several constituencies where No won (most obviously the Dublin and Cork ones, but also Longford-Westmeath) while many ones where Yes won (especially in Donegal and Galway) voted strongly for Dev. Interestingly, though, some places like Kerry and Tipperary went strongly for Dev but a lot less so for Yes.


The 1968 referendum failed by a much greater margin, probably not helped by the Third Amendment (which is why this was termed the Fourth) being voted on simultaneously which would have allowed rural malapportionment beyond the existing 5% variation in population across constituencies. This allowed FG and Labour to even more clearly point to FF trying to rig the system against them, and I wouldn't be surprised if the rise of the civil rights movement on the other side of the border further raised public suspicions. In any case, the amendment failed by a margin of over 20.5%, and the idea of FPTP in Ireland was basically abandoned.

Interestingly enough, the Third and Fourth Amendments to the Irish Constitution that were eventually adopted brought it into what was then the EEC and lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, so they had just as much constitutional significance as a switch to FPTP might have done if not more.

 

[prime-minister]

My brain works in weird ways sometimes- I found out someone’s subtitled the Dutch version of Robot Wars, and it made me want to research and map some old Dutch elections. To start with, here’s the 1946 election, the first after World War II.


After the Netherlands was liberated, Queen Wilhelmina dismissed the war cabinet formed by the government-in-exile and convened a cabinet including three of the prewar parties- the Christian democratic Roman Catholic State Party (Roomsch-Katholieke Staatspartij, RKSP), the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, SDAP) and the social liberal Free-thinking Democratic League (Vrijzinnig Democratische Bond, VDB), with Willem Schermerhorn of the last of those three parties serving as Prime Minister. However, public pressure to hold a new election after eight years was understandably high, given the Staten-Generaal didn’t reconvene until November 1945 and when it did reconvene it comprised the members elected to the preceding term (minus collaborators and those who had died during the war, obviously).

In the leadup to the election, all the governing parties were to rebrand themselves. The SDAP and VDB, helped by the friendly relations between Schermerhorn and Deputy Prime Minister Willem Drees, chose to merge their parties (along with a minor Christian socialist party, the CDU) into a new left-wing party called the Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA). Their decision was based on a movement called the Doorbraak, seeking to break the pillarisation of Dutch politics into Catholic and Calvinist religious lines by forming a united progressive party to stand against them. The PvdA also took inspiration from the success of the British Labour Party, reflected in its name and its first electoral campaign, which even used the slogan ‘Doe als Tommy; hij koos Labour’ (‘Do as Tommy; he chose Labour’), and while it didn’t emulate Labour’s landslide, it did come close to becoming the largest party.

A few months before the PvdA’s formation, the RKSP had also reformed itself into the Catholic People’s Party (Katholieke Volkspartij, KVP), adopting a more pragmatic catch-all platform both religiously (despite the name, it was now open for non-Catholics to join) and ideologically (being open to cooperation with both the PvdA and the Protestant parties) and mainly seeking to keep itself in power. This worked well for it, at least in the short term, as it won a larger share of the vote than the RKSP or its predecessor the General League of Roman Catholic Caucuses (catchy name there) ever had and remained the biggest party in the Tweede Kamer.

The surge for these two parties was accompanied by an underwhelming performance by the Protestant parties; the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Anti-Revolutionaire Partij, ARP) was isolated for its fierce opposition to decolonisation in Indonesia, the Christian Historical Union (Christelijk-Historische Unie, CHU) was damaged by some figures in the party like Piet Lieftinck (who had been Minister of Finance and oversaw ‘financial sanitation’ to solve Dutch hyperinflation after the Reichsmark, which the guilder was linked to, collapsed) left for the PvdA, and the Reformed Political Party (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij, SGP) was... well, doing its own crazy thing in its little corner of Dutch Protestant politics just as it always does.

Of more note were two parties from outside the governing coalition which surged in support. The biggest winner of the 1946 election amongst the opposition was, as you might expect, the Communist Party of the Netherlands (Communistische Partij Nederland, CPN), who secured their best ever result here. The factors for this are probably obvious (Resistance, Cold War not in full swing, leftists supporting them over the PvdA for loyalty to The Revolution, yadda yadda yadda). The other notable success story was the Freedom Party (Partij van de Vrijheid, PvdV), the successor to the old Liberal State Party, which would in 1948 be joined by right-wing dissidents from the PvdA to form the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which would go on to do some things in Dutch politics later down the line.

Although the KVP had fought against the socialist economic planning advocated by the PvdA, and it could in theory have allyed with the other Christian parties, in practice the Catholics were more opposed to the Protestant parties than to the socialists (plus governing with the PvdA was more practical for the reasons mentioned above and since it would be a continuation of the existing government). The Queen appointed KVP Minister of the Interior Louis Beel as Prime Minister to replace Schemerhorn, and he and the PvdA formed a new grand coalition with Drees continuing as Deputy Prime Minister.

The new government, nicknamed the ‘red-Roman’ coalition, was the first time an alliance between the Catholics and socialists had been formed after a Dutch election, and despite the divisions between the parties ideologically, it would ultimately be crucial to building the Dutch welfare state and ending the colonial war in the East Indies, and through these issues, had a significant impact on Dutch postwar politics going forward...

 

[prime-minister]

Here's a little WIP I've been trying to do that I could use a hand with. Since AJRElectionMaps ended their excellent series on Kiwi elections in 1990, I wanted to try doing 1993 as it's both a very dramatic election and the last election held in New Zealand under pure FPTP. The problem is I could only find the full vote totals for some of the seats, and while Wikipedia has the majority in raw votes for every seat, without knowing the voteshares I can't use those to finish the map. If anyone knows where to get the rest of the results so I can finish it it'd be much appreciated!

Here's the map so far for anyone who's curious (also note that some of my attempts to edit the 1987 boundaries from Max's map to the 1993 ones may be off):

 

[prime-minister]

A couple of years ago on the Other Place I made some maps of the first three Spanish elections after the transition to democracy (which you can also find on my DeviantArt), and I've finally got round to mapping and doing a writeup for the fourth.

On the surface, the 1982 election looked like the start of a social democratic revolution for Spain given the progressive manifesto the PSOE had had and its large victory in the local and regional elections in May 1983. However, while González’s time as Prime Minister of Spain would not be short-lived, the excitement of the left for his government very much would be.

As González assumed office, Spain’s economy was only worsening, with a 15% inflation rate, $4 billion current account, 17% unemployment rate, public budget deficit and a GDP growing almost half as fast as the OCDE forecast it should be. These looked set to prove a considerable roadblock to the government trying to fully reintegrate Spain into the international community, and González’s Economy Minister Miguel Boyer would try to compensate for this by devaluing the peseta and pursuing industrial restructuring to close obsolete industries. As one might expect, the voters who had voted in an ostensibly socialist government had were displeased by this, and strike action from even the pro-socialist UGT against these economic policies occurred during González’s first term.

It’s worth noting, however, that the government didn’t pursue quite as merciless an economically dry policy agenda as in other countries that elected more right-wing governments, and kept true to some of its key commitments, including the 40-hour work week, 30 days of annual leave, free education expansion from 14 to 16 and the reform of university education. It also nationalised the collapsing Rumasa merchant banking-affiliated company to prevent it from bankruptcy, though this led to a judicial conflict that would drag on until December 1986.

On social policy, González’s government was much more progressive in many areas. Over the course of its first term it established the General Health Law that created the Sistema Nacional de Salud (SNS) and became the basis for universal healthcare in Spain, introduced laws to partly decriminalize abortion, reorganized the armed forces to give more civil power over the military while increasing the wages of forces members, and of course successfully integrated Spain into the EEC (helped by González and French President François Mitterand having a good working relationship).

There was one big exception to this progressivism, however- due to the Basque nationalist ETA committing further terrorist activities, the government introduced harsher penalties for crimes of terrorism, and from 1983 to 1987 supported the illegal establishment of GAL (‘Antiterrorist Liberation Group’) death squads which kidnapped and killed ETA members (and sometimes also just Basque nationalists). This would eventually be revealed in the early 1990s, and is popularly known as the guerra suica (‘dirty war’).

This wasn’t the contentious issue most of the Spanish public were focused on during this period, however- that was the issue of Spanish membership of NATO. As mentioned in the 1982 writeup, the PSOE had pledged to withdraw from NATO, but the US and EEC were determined for it to stay, much to the chagrin of Fernando Morán, González’s first Foreign Minister who resigned due to the party switching to supporting NATO. This was, however, conditional on a referendum, in which the PSOE stressed three key terms it had made for joining: opting out of NATO’s military structure, a ban on the US storing nuclear weapons on its territory, and gradually reducing US military presence in Spain.

Despite the PSOE being basically the only party to campaign for NATO membership, Spain voted to remain in NATO by a larger margin than expected. González chose to call a snap election four months ahead of schedule to coincide with the Andalusian regional election largely because of this. The best way to sum up the 1986 election is that, if 1982 was the Spanish equivalent of the UK in 1997, 1986 was the UK in 2001- the enthusiasm for the more left-wing governing party had died down significantly, but by and large about the same proportion of voters were prepared to back it for another term, and most who weren’t just abstained (though nowhere near as many as in the UK in 2001).

The most notable thing about it, really, is how fractured the opposition was. The AP-PDP alliance had incorporated the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal, PL) that had been part of the UCD when that party finally collapsed, and now used the common name the People’s Coalition (Coalicion Popular, CP). The CP ran to the PSOE’s right, pushing for privatisation of public companies and healthcare assistance, a harsher war on Basque nationalism, a war on drugs, revising the divorce law and recriminalizing abortion. However, most voters saw it as too right-wing and a poor opposition, which was not helped by its decision to encourage voters to abstain on the NATO referendum despite supporting Spanish membership of NATO, which it did purely to try to undermine González. It suffered a small loss of seats compared to 1982 and the alliance would break apart by the following year.

More successful was the CDS that former PM Adolfo Suárez had formed prior to the 1982 election. Surprisingly, Suárez criticised the PSOE from the left, claiming it had broken its promises from the last election, and advocated for Spain’s foreign policy to be less dependent on the US and for a more interventionist economic agenda that would create a better welfare state and fairer distribution of income. Between this and his status as the heir to the UCD’s old position, the CDS tripled its voteshare and increased its seat total almost tenfold in 1986.

At the same time as Suárez, Catalan politician Miquel Roca was in the process of trying to develop a centrist party to capitalise on discontent with the main two, and his party CiU allied with the Galician Coalition (but sadly not the POG) and an assortment of other regional parties to form the Democratic Reformist Party (Partido Reformista Democrático, PRD). Functionally the CiU did well out of the alliance, but it didn’t elect a single member outside of Catalonia and Galicia and like the CP basically fell apart after the election.

Finally, big changes had occurred in the PCE. Its old leader Santiago Carrillo had resigned after the party was routed in 1982, and his successor Gerardo Iglesias had not shared Carrillo’s conciliatory profile. Under his leadership the PCE aggressively attacked the PSOE for ignoring trade unions with regards to the economic restructuring, and was especially hostile to Spanish membership of NATO. It had worked with a number of smaller parties (noticing a theme here?) first to campaign for Spain’s exit from NATO in the referendum, and then formed an alliance with them to fight the 1986 election under. This alliance would become United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU).

In any case, the headline of the election was that the PSOE won a second, though reduced, majority, giving González a renewed mandate despite the dissatisfaction of many voters.

 

[prime-minister]

Guess who found another map they made ages ago and never got round to posting anywhere?

The 1995 presidential election, held at the end of François Mitterand's second term, were widely seen as hopeless for the PS considering... basically everything to happen to them so far in the 90s, really, but especially the 'petit oui' result of the 1992 referendum and the 1993 legislative election where they were utterly routed. Ironically, after picking Lionel Jospin over party leader Henri Emmanuelli, Jospin ran a surprisingly strong campaign, winning the popular vote in the first round over his two RPR competitors.

The RPR divided between Prime Minister Édouard Balladur and ex-PM, Mayor of Paris and 1988 presidential candidate Jacques Chirac. Balladur had promised not to run against Chirac in 1995, but broke this promise because of his support from right-wingers and ended up running to the right of the more traditional Gaullist Chirac. Chirac's attacks on the 'social fracture' and 'dominant thought' both strengthened his position against Balladur, and ultimately he came over 2 points ahead of Balladur. The rift between the two led Chirac to refuse to make Balladur PM once he ascended to the Presidency.

The election also had prevalent competitors to the RPR's right, namely well-known face in the racism fandom Jean-Marie le Pen and Philippe de Villiers, ex-communications minister under Chirac and former member of Giscard D'Estaing's UDF who had veered to the right and formed the Movement for France (MpF) to oppose the more pro-European consensus of the major parties. He won his home departement of Vendée, while le Pen won the traditionally right-wing Alsace-Lorraine and riviera departements that are generally its strongholds.

In the second round, Chirac reinforced his pivot to the centre and the competition between him and Jospin proved surprisingly cordial, especially compared to the harsh conflict in the first round. The most prominent conflict in the debates ended up being the question of term limits, with Jospin saying, 'It is better five years with Jospin than seven years with Jacques Chirac. That would be very long.' The wimpiness of that quote sums it up to me, really.

Despite his lead in the first round, but unsurprisingly considering how much it had been down to division on the right, Jospin was beaten by a fairly comfortable margin. Having said that, he had clearly revitalised the PS, and only good things would go on to happen for him. Certainly not a second run for the presidency coming to a deeply depressing end seven years later, no siree.

EDIT: Changed the shade of purple I used for Villiers, hopefully this purple stands out better from Jospin's pinks.

 

[prime-minister]

Big Canadian boi incoming.

This is obviously a similar idea to the one Thande did ages ago for US presidential elections, but with some substantial differences. Canada's swinginess and receptiveness to parties besides the two major ones, and how long that's been a thing, are obvious, plus both the landslides and the speed with which they were overturned (aside from in the 90s, though of course that's more due to the split on the right than Chrétien's government being that beloved) really stand out. I think the 'wrong winner' results also stand out more because mapping Canadian elections this way shows how much those results are due to one party absolutely dominating a small number of provinces despite their opponents being more popular elsewhere.

I also find it amusing how the NDP have won all the territories at various times because they're single seats with very small electorates which they can fairly easily win based on local issues- despite how malapportioned the territorial ridings are, they actually tend to represent the NDP's consistent if small role in Canadian politics more accurately than the two-party contests in the provinces often do.

 

[prime-minister]

It randomly dawned on me that there is a source for the 1993 NZ election: the TVNZ election night results! Well, sort of. They're a bit off because their 'final' figures are actually preliminary ones published once the result in each seat was clear (aside from Waitaki, which they of course misreported as a Labour gain instead of a narrow National hold), so I checked their margins against the final margins found in the table on Wikipedia and altered the margins accordingly. In any case, voila!

While my writeup probably won't be to the standard of David's, I'll give it a go nonetheless.

The Fourth National Government was swept into office with a mandate from the electorate to reverse 'Rogernomics', and Prime Minister Jim Bolger's wing of the party did sympathise with this idea; Bolger's plan had been to make Bill Birch, one of the champions of the 'Think Big' interventionist programme from the Muldoon era, his Minister of Finance. However, the popularity of the neoliberal Ruth Richardson within the party and the threat of the Bank of New Zealand going bankrupt and a severe fiscal deficit in the coming year forced his hand.

Richardson's first budget in 1991, nicknamed the 'Mother of all Budgets', slashed unemployment, sickness and welfare benefits, things even the Fourth Labour Government hadn't touched. The government also enacted the Employment Contracts Act to replace collective bargaining rights with individual employment contracts, massively disempowering unions. Not surprisingly, this led to a long-term rise in inequality, and even less surprisingly, the voters who had abandoned Labour over 'Rogernomics' were furious about 'Ruthanasia'.

While Labour were reforming somewhat in opposition, with 'Rogernomics' critic Michael Cullen as Shadow Minister of Finance, the party was still led by Mike Moore, who had just lost by the biggest landslide since first coming to power, and wasn't doing much to shake its previously strong association with neoliberalism. Forces on the left were coalescing around two forces that had stood against both Labour and National in the previous election- the NewLabour Party of ex-Labour chair Jim Anderton, and the Greens, who had between them won 12% of the vote in 1990, formed a grouping named the Alliance. They were also joined by the Democrats (née Social Credit), the Māori rights party Mana Motuhake, and later the Liberal Party, made up of National dissidents.

The Alliance quickly made a splash, making significant gains on the Auckland Regional Council and then in 1992 almost winning Robert Muldoon's old electorate of Tamaki at a by-election. Further aiding its position besides the protest vote and its consistently anti-neoliberal position was its steadfast support for electoral reform. After Labour and then National had pledged to hold referenda on the system and then tried to dodge the issue once elected, voters had come to distrust them both on the issue (and many other issues, of course).

When a non-binding referendum was held on replacing FPTP (or FPP as it was generally known in NZ), 84.7% of respondents voted to do so, expressing a strong preference for a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system that would give fairer representation to smaller parties. Despite the overwhelming success of the non-binding referendum forcing the government to allow a binding referendum at the same time as the following year's election, government politicians and business leaders fought hard against it. This is believed to have ended up damaging the campaign for keeping FPTP, though, as it tied the current system to the deeply unpopular current government.

As if the existing political establishment didn't have enough problems, one of their own subsequently defected from National. Winston Peters, who had been dismissed from cabinet in 1991 after criticising the government's policy, sued and then resigned from the party and Parliament in April 1993, forming a new party named New Zealand First. NZ First was unspokenly conceived as a Muldoonist party, inheriting his socially conservative, economically populist stances and directing them back at a National Party applying laissez-faire economics. While it polled far behind the other three parties, Peters won his Tauranga seat resoundingly both at the by-election and at the general election, and it also upset Northern Māori MP Bruce Gregory, the first time since 1938 that any party except Labour had won a Māori seat.

Among the three largest parties, as expected the Alliance was shafted by the FPTP system, though it did still win two seats. National's lead was massively slashed and Labour making a substantial recovery compared to its rout three years prior, though National scraped a majority thanks to a recount in Waitaki going its way. The Labour caucus proceeded to decapitate Mike Moore, who had further embarrassed the party with his 'long dark night' speech that came across as triumphalist despite Labour's narrow loss, and Bolger dismissed Richardson as Finance Minister as a result of 'Ruthanasia' almost costing National the election.

However, the real legacy of the 1993 election wouldn't be the election itself so much as the aforementioned referendum. By 53.86% to 46.14%, voters chose to introduce MMP, and so the 1993 House of Representatives would be the last one elected by FPTP.

 

[prime-minister]

Japan in 2009 has to be one of the weirdest elections in history when you put it in the grander scheme of the country's political culture. At first glance you'd assume it was a landslide defeat for the LDP based on scandals, economic frustrations and exhaustion with it after decades in power that made it a watershed election comparable to the US in the 1994 midterms or the UK in 1997. But the DPJ government which won it was described as exemplifying 'the paradox of political change without policy change' having campaigned on policies that were basically indistinguishable from the LDP, and proceeded to tear itself apart for the following three years, with its flagship policy of a consumption tax getting quashed by the LDP when that party returned to power in 2012 by a landslide as big as they'd ever had.

 

[prime-minister]

Sometimes you just get the idea to look up a country you know quite little about. Anyway, have a Mongolian election map.

In all honesty, my main association with Mongolia is the band The Hu, but modern Mongolia is an interesting place. In spite of being surrounded by two famously hostile and imperialist neighbours, it's been a de facto independent nation since the 1910s, a de jure one since after the Second World War and a fairly stable democracy since 1990 (supposedly, the country's leader Jambyn Batmönkh was urged to crack down on the protests and flatly refused, saying 'We few Mongols have not yet come to the point that we will make each other's noses bleed').

I say 'fairly' stable because while Mongolia has enjoyed peaceful transitions of power and most of its elections are considered to be free and fair, there have been big lapses on this front, most infamously in 2008 when the opposition claimed the election had been rigged and protests led to aggressive police brutality and a fire starting at the governing MPRP's headquarters. After the 2009 election saw the opposition DP win the presidency, the MPRP accepted the result, and subsequent elections have been largely without incidents of this kind.

Mongolia has alternated a lot between voting systems- from the first democratic elections until 2004 it used single seat FPTP constituencies, in 2008, 2016 and 2020 it used bloc vote multi-member constituencies (I find it kinda amusing that despite using a bunch of different electoral systems for the provinces in my China TL, I've never used that one), and in 2012 it used a proportional system, which apparently is being restored for the 2024 election.

I decided to map 2020 the same way as the bloc vote seats from my Taiwan map, with the background colour denoting the party to get the largest voteshare versus the second largest and the colours behind the little mans telling you how far they each were ahead of the next strongest candidate. Next election they'll be changing it back to a proportional system, and although the sources I've found weren't clear if it'll be mixed-member like 2012 I presume so.

Results-wise, the 2020 election was fairly dull, with the Mongolian People's Party (MPP, formerly the MPRP- it dropped the word 'Revolutionary' from its name in 2010) winning re-election with a slightly reduced but still dominant majority while the DP lost 9 points in the popular vote but still gained seats compared to its 2016 rout. Incidentally, those parties are fairly humdrum- the MPP is a social democratic party which still has a sight tinge of post-communism and the DP is a liberal-conservative and somewhat nationalist outfit that claims authority by association with the revolution.

The two parties that each won one seat are more interesting, at least. The Mongolian People's Revoutionary Party (MPRP) split off from the MPP when it changed its name because it wanted to pursue a more populist and nationalist stance, and won a seat as part of Our Coalition in alliance with the Civil Will-Green Party, which is a green party, and the Mongolian Traditional United Party, a hard-right nationalist outfit. It dissolved in 2021 and folded back into the MPP (The Artist Formerly Known As The MPRP), because this split wasn't absurd enough already.

The Right Person Electorate Coalition, meanwhile, elected one member from the National Labour Party, which suddenly started picking up steam after the election due to the popularity of its one MP Togmidyn Dorjkhand, the second place finish of its candidate Dangaasürengiin Enkhbat in the 2021 presidential election, and its rebrand as the Hun Party (yes, really).

 

[prime-minister]

A couple of months ago Nigeria's presidential election was held, and it proved the most multi-cornered one in the country's democratic history, though the results were plagued by low turnout of about 27% (8% lower than 2019 and just over half that of 2011) and all opponents to the victorious APC calling on the country's electoral commission to rerun the election due to accusations of vote buying, intimidation, fraud and violence.

In blue are the states won by Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Founded as an alliance of opposition parties unified by their support for the ideology of Muhammadu Buhari, who served as Nigerian dictator from 1983 to 1985 and pursued a nationalist, protectionist, anti-corruption and austere economic policy, as a civilian he advocated a more interventionist economic policy called 'Neo-Buharism' that the APC represent and which was commonly judged a cult of personality. Even so, under his watch the APC became Nigeria's strongest party, and Tinubu, a former member of the pro-democracy movement and a prominent figure inside the Buhari administration, managed to keep its support together enough to win over his opponents (on the official figures, at least).

In green are the states won by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP; the lack of plural apostrophe in the first word is their spelling, not an error on my part), a conservative neoliberal party traditionally popular with southern and Christian Nigerians which won every presidential election from 1999 to 2015. Abubakar is an eclectic figure, a federalist advocate of privatisation with a vocal focus on education and a polygamous lifestyle (he's had five wives and 28 children).

In red are the states won by Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), Abubakar's running mate in 2019 who left the PDP during that party's nomination process and formed a populist third-party campaign attacking the status quo and the tribal divides of the current political system. The 'Obi-dients', as his supporters were nicknamed, included some forces who hadn't previously endorsed a political candidate for office, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and TUC and Aisha Yesufu, cofounder of the #BringBackOurGirls movement.

In yellow is the state (Kano) won by Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP). Kwankso and his party are described as following the 'Third Position', which is a euphemism for postwar fascism (albeit with some somewhat more left-wing economic policies), and like Obi he ran for the PDP nomination and switched to a minor party having failed to get it. His vote was strong in his home state, but he ran far behind the other three candidates (who were only separated by 11.21%) nationwide.

 

[prime-minister]

So I made the 1973 Irish election for my dA ages ago, and I've been sitting on 1977 for a while, so behold!

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the state of Irish politics in the 1970s and the fact they were the first non-Fianna Fáil government in Eire since the 1950s, the National Coalition would prove one of the most controversial governments the Republic has ever had. In addition to Cosgrave feuding with FF President Erskine Childers over Childers’ efforts to make a think tank for the office, its Finance Minister Richie Ryan would introduce austerity measures in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and raise marginal income tax rates, and his expansion of welfare provisions didn’t do much to make up for this.

The new government’s policy on the Troubles also proved controversial. To try to help bring them to an end and to keep good relations with the UK, Cosgrave signed the Sunningdale Agreement and took a hard line on Sinn Fein and both IRA branches. A big part of this was the extension of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Conor Cruise O’Brien (which is both the most 70s name for a government department I’ve ever heard and one of the most Irish politician names I’ve ever heard without using Gaelic spelling), championed to censor republican sentiment. Cruise O’Brien particularly pushed for its rollout against the Irish Press, effectively causing its editor Tim Pat Coogan to declare ‘editorial war’ on the National Coalition over suppression of freedom of speech.

After President Childers died, Cosgrave’s government agreed to the unopposed election of Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, then proceeded to fight with him for the next two years. Ó Dálaigh also strongly opposed the curtailment of freedom of speech during the Troubles, he and Cosgrave rarely met, and Cosgrave represented Ireland to foreign governments instead of him on several occasions. Ó Dálaigh ultimately resigned in October 1976 after referring the Emergency Powers Bill following the assassination of British Ambassador to Ireland Christopher Ewart-Biggs by the IRA, and being blamed by Defence Minister Paddy Donegan for supposedly allowing another IRA attack in Mountmellick the day it was passed by delaying it. Cosgrave’s refusal to sack Donegan from the Cabinet further damaged the National Coalition’s popularity.

In opposition, Jack Lynch of Fianna Fáil remained popular, being nicknamed ‘the real Taoiseach’, and benefitted from Childers’ election, Ó Dálaigh being shunned by Cosgrave and his ally Patrick Hillery taking over from Ó Dálaigh. Furthermore, the National Coalition had unintentionally burnished Fianna Fáil’s republican credentials with its hardline stance, and while Lynch had received some criticism for allowing Charles Haughey back into his front bench in 1975, the government’s crackdown on republican sentiment was much more controversial.

In spite of the controversy, the National Coalition was favoured to win the 1977 election for two main reasons. The first was a lack of confidence, at least early on in the campaign, in Fianna Fáil’s policy platform, and the second was the ‘Tullymander’ produced by Local Government Minister James Tully, redrawing the Dáil constituencies to maximise Fine Gael and Labour votes. When compared to electoral maps before and since, which are generally quite loyal to county boundaries (and since this one have been drawn by an impartial commission), the ‘Tullymander’ is pretty obvious, as are its tricks like putting many 3-seat constituencies around Dublin to try and ensure one member from each party.

However, both of the National Coalition’s assumed advantages would backfire- the former fell apart when Fianna Fáil went for broke and drew up a manifesto pledging economic ‘sweeteners’ such as abolishing rates on houses and car tax and pledging to cut unemployment to under 100,000, and the latter came under scrutiny thanks to reinforcing the image of the coalition as authoritarian, and giving more ammunition to the Irish Times and Irish Press to attack them for trying to subvert liberal democratic processes.

By the end of the campaign Fianna Fáil was predicted to have come from behind and won, but the landslide it won was unexpected; it took an absolute majority of votes and seats in the Dáil for the last time to date, and the ‘Tullymander’ even worked in its favour in Dublin, as it managed to take two of the three seats in several constituencies by clearing 40% of the vote. Only one constituency, Dublin South-Central, did not give Fianna Fáil the most first preference votes, and the disastrous nature of the result led Cosgrave and Labour leader Brendan Corish to resign their party leadership.

Ireland had voted, as Fianna Fáil had recommended, to ‘bring back Jack’, though his second term would be marked by continued controversy and (ahem) troubles.

 

[prime-minister]

Since I found out Estonia's just legalised gay marriage, I felt like mapping an election or two from there, as you do. I'm working on 2023 as I found a very nice resource for it, but it's taking a while so I did a quicker one: the 2004 EU Parliament election.

Why such a random election, you may ask? Well, just look at it:

As you might guess knowing how weak the Estonian Social Democrats generally are, their massive landslide victory here was basically just a personal vote for Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who would become President two years later. He got 76,120 personal votes compared to 16,633 for the next most popular candidate (Siiri Oviir of Centre) and 5,263 for the next strongest SDE candidate!

 

[prime-minister]

Tonight was a productive evening.

The 1989 House of Councillors election was a victory for the opposition JSP over the LDP more or less for the first time since the LDP came into being, and this victory and the prominent leadership of Takako Doi led to discussion of the possibility of a 'great reversal' where the JSP might replace it in government.

Looking at the map, it's not hard to see why this was speculated about, though it's worth remembering the LDP was also badly hampered at the time by the Recruit scandal, consumption tax hike, a shift towards free trade (which turned many rural voters against the LDP) and Prime Minister Sōsuke Uno's sex scandal, which had come to light just a month before the election. The defeat would lead Uno to resign less than three weeks later, and the LDP would recover- by the time it was turfed out in 1993, it fell more due to defections from its members rather than from its voters, and the JSP would fail to capitalise.

Like the House of Representatives, the upper house of the National Diet was also elected by single non-transferable vote, though unlike the lower house Councillors are still elected in this manner to this day. However, 50 of the 252 Councillors are also elected to a single national constituency. The JSP won the popular vote for the national constituency, but not the prefectural constituencies, because of many unity candidates being endorsed to combat LDP Councillors.

Speaking of which, the Democratic Reform Party bears a little explaining- from what I can gather it was basically a unity ticket for the socialist parties in certain constituencies, though in others the JSP endorsed independents instead (I've differentiated them as such on the map- weirdly enough, Hokkaido had both a JSP-backed independent and a JSP candidate elected). I could be wrong, mind, since I can't find a page for it even on Japanese Wikipedia and I'm guessing based on the fact every DRP candidate to be elected was jointly endorsed by the socialist parties.

 

[prime-minister]

I made this quite a while back, but here's the 1989 Brazilian presidential election, the first of Lula's six runs for the country's head of state in which he narrowly lost to the ardent libertarian Fernando Collor. Notably, he and Leonel Brizola were less than a percentage point apart, so I've decided to illustrate that too:

Fun game, guess what state Brizola was a governor of before the coup

 

[prime-minister]

Staying on 1980s Brazil, I decided to start mapping the elections that accompanied its transition back to democracy, starting with 1982. You could argue that the democratisation process started with the ascent of Ernesto Guisel to the Presidency in 1974, but it was a slow and rocky process, with Guisel ending the authoritarian AI-5 in late 1978 and his successor João Figueiredo passing a general amnesty and legalising the formation of new political parties in 1979.

However, this wasn't done so much out of a desire to liberalise the opposition as to neuter the increasingly popular Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, MDB), the catch-all parliamentary opposition under the dictatorship by splitting the anti-government vote and allowing the government to rebrand. The pro-military dictatorship National Renewal Alliance (Aliança Renovadora Nacional, ARENA- much as they were obviously an abhorrent government, that is a cool acronym) was disbanded and reorganised into the Democratic Social Party (Partido Democrático Social, PDS), which stood for very similar policies but with slightly less overtly authoritarian rhetoric. They maintained the apparatus and support of the military government, and this allowed the PDS to win a large plurality in the new Chamber of Deputies, though it came a few seats short of an overall majority.

The MDB was slightly hampered by the government's legalisation of new political parties by the provision that all parties now had to include the word 'party' in their name, forcing it to change its name to the slightly tautologous Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, PMDB), which it would retain for the next 37 years. At this point, it was still a catch-all party of anti-government non-guerilla forces, but the liberalisation of the 1970s had made it less of a puppet opposition, and its being kept away from power allowed it to form a big tent alliance of both members and voters, helping it come very close to overtaking the PDS in both votes and seats.

Three new parties founded after the 1979 electoral reform ran in and won seats in the 1982 election, and they remain fixtures of the Brazilian political world to this day. The largest of the three was the Democratic Labour Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, PDT), founded by former Governor of Rio Grande do Sul Leonel Brizola, who had fled to Uruguay with João Goulart after the 1964 coup and returned in 1979 hoping to restart the old Brazilian Labour Party of Goulart and Vargas. The military government turned him down, but he was able to found his own new party, which managed to win a fair few seats, most of which were from Rio de Janeiro, where Brizola had settled.

The next-largest party was the, erm, Brazilian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, PTB), which the government awarded the PTB name to ostensibly because of the involvement of Ivete Vargas, Getúlio's niece, but perhaps also because of the potential success the PDT might enjoy with the legitimacy of association with the last socialist movement to govern Brazil. The PTB made out like it was more left-wing than it actually was; ironically it contained some politicians who had been opposed to the original PTB; and after the hung vote came in it aligned with the PDS to give it a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Finally, 1982 was the modest electoral beginnings of the Worker's Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). Formed from a mix of urban guerilla groups, liberation theology advocates ('When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist" and all that), and especially labour movements in the industrial ABC region of São Paulo state. Its factions were united by democratic socialism, trying to push unions against the conservative intervention of the CGT and the infiltration of the PCB. They only took 8 seats, overshadowed by the more moderate left and centre-left of the PMDB and PDT, but their influence was to grow over time, to put it mildly.

 

[prime-minister]

Here’s 1986. You can probably tell just by looking that a lot had changed between 1982 and this election, the main one being that civilian rule had officially been restored. However, the present Constitution and direct presidential elections were still a little way off; the previous year the last presidential election by the Congress had been held.

The really big decline to note is the PDS, which had badly fallen apart since 1982 for a handful of reasons. For one, it had gotten itself in hot water by preventing a bill that would have raised the minimum wage at a time when inflation in Brazil was reaching 239% annually, and for another, despite the emergence of the Diretas Já movement advocating for the replacement of the electoral college with direct presidential elections, enough of the PDS’s members abstained to kill the bill when it was voted on in the Congress.

The stagnation the government was causing was a point of contention for a lot of the PDS as well as the opposition, and a large faction of the PDS left the party to form the Liberal Front Party (Partido da Frente Liberal, PFL), which sided with the PMDB and opposition by supporting Diretas Já. They also provided the PMDB’s candidate Tancredo Neves with his running mate, José Sarney, and Neves won a landslide over the PDS’s candidate, Paulo Maluf, who had a reputation for pork barrel spending and licking the military’s boots.

Neves would not live to see out his presidency, dying only a month after assuming office, and instead Sarney became President. While he’s very negatively remembered now, by the time the 1986 election rolled around the PMDB was enjoying its highest ebb of popularity; the party had passed constitutional amendments to allow voting for the illiterate and communist parties, and made the president, mayors and governors directly elected, it had made it clear it would treat the next Congress as a constituent assembly to write a new constitution, and it had replaced the hyperinflated cruzeiro with the not-yet-hyperinflated cruzado.

All of this, and the massively divided opposition (even by Brazilian standards), meant the PMDB was able to win enough seats to form the only majority government in Brazil’s democratic history. The PDS utterly crashed and the PFL made a weak opposition with less than half as many seats and being more than 30 points behind the PMDB. Things got more interesting with the minor parties, though, as the three newcomers from 1982 all gained seats and six more entered it.

On top of that, all the new parties would serve an interesting role later on; the Liberal Party (PL) would provide Lula’s Vice President in 2002; the PDC was the original home of Jair Bolsonaro (I had to double check that wasn’t him in Rio, thankfully not); the PCB would eventually turn into a centrist third-way party after the Iron Curtain fell (so it goes in Brazilian politics); the PCdoB would provide the PT’s vice-presidential candidate in 2018; the PSB would become a vehicle for Ciro Gomes and later Geraldo Ackmin; and the PSC would become another home for Bolsonaro.

You might think that the PMDB would be in good stead to establish a dominant position in Brazilian politics after such a massive landslide, but instead what lay ahead for it was some dramatic splits as its transition from catch-all opposition party to party of government would be swiftly followed to it transitioning into a machine politics-based supporter of other parties' governments.

 

[prime-minister]

Since I just got back from a lovely long weekend in Dublin (I now officially believe in spice bag supremacy), I decided to do a writeup for this 1981 election map I made a while back.

*

Despite Fianna Fáil’s landslide victory in 1977, things soon began to go south for the government. For a start, the economy was struggling even with the few ‘sweeteners’ FF had pledged in the election that got delivered, as despite cutting unemployment the economy reached a staggering £17.6% deficit and the national debt went up by £2 billion. With the 1979 oil crisis, electricity charges and the PAYE scheme for several jobs hurting consumers, the government was soon flagging on both fronts.

Party discipline was also becoming a major issue, and in a way which would hurt FF long term as the two candidates who would eventually run to succeed Jack Lynch as Taoiseach both ran into trouble. In 1978, Lynch’s Minister of Finance (and protégé) George Colley tried to impose a 2% levy on farmers only to be forced to relent by backbenchers even though the public supported it and protested to have it pass. The same year, Minister for Health Charles Haughey tried to enforce the constitutional right to use contraceptives through the Family Planning Bill, allowing contraceptives to be sold if a medical prescription was given; his description of this as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’ was widely mocked by the opposition.

Lynch was finally forced out by- all together now- the Troubles. The Thatcher government was, of course, not exactly the friendliest to Ireland, and after several IRA murders earlier during 1979, most prominently Airey Neave and Earl Mountbatten, Lynch and Thatcher opened discussions over a security review and changes to cross-boundary policy. In particular, the proposal of a 5km air corridor between the border was aggressively opposed by the FF backbench, with TD Síle de Valera (Dev’s granddaughter) raising that party policy was that the British should withdraw from the North. Another backbencher, Dr Bill Loughanne, accused Lynch of deliberately misleading the party, and when Lynch tried and failed to remove the whip from Loughanne, it was clear the game was up for him. (Losing two by-elections to Fine Gael in Cork North-East and Lynch’s own Cork City didn’t help matters.)

Lynch’s hope had been that his fairly sudden resignation would benefit Colley’s bid for the leadership, but Haughey and his ‘gang of five’ TDs had anticipated Lynch would have to stand down and built up Haughey as a candidate with a ‘new’ image in contrast to Colley’s status as the continuity candidate. The major blow to Colley’s campaign was the last-minute defection of Foreign Minister Michael O’Kennedy, which allowed Haughey to become Taoiseach in an upset.

However, right from the beginning Haughey was beset by problems, as Colley had the right to veto Haughey’s appointments for Minister of Defence and of Justice and Haughey in turn elbowed him out of the Finance Ministry, basically taking up that position for himself. In January 1980, he gave a televised address in which he stated borrowing was unsustainable, only to increase public spending even more. Despite this, he did retain a fair amount of popularity both for this pork-barreling and for not being seen as a wet blanket on Norn Iron like Lynch was, and so in early 1981 it was expected he’d call an election at the FF ardfheis on the 14th February. However, in the early hours of that night a fire broke out in the Stardust nightclub in Haughey’s Dublin constituency, and the ardfheis was postponed.

By the time it was able to be held, Interesting Things were happening. In March, the Maze Prison hunger strikes started, and not only did they secure significant media interest internationally, they also led supporters in Eire to run for election to the Dáil under the Anti H-Block label. Two were elected, hunger striker Kieran Doherty and blanket protestor Paddy Agnew (the former was from Belfast, the latter from County Louth; both were elected in absentia as they were interned at the Maze Prison, and much like the more famous Bobby Sands on the other side of the border, Doherty died while on hunger strike), and in general the movement’s prominence deflated republican support for FF. It would also contribute to the rise of the modern Sinn Fein, though once that party finally entered the Dáil in 1997 its members would sit in the chamber.

Speaking of Sinn Fein, another party had emerged which took that name- Sinn Féin The Workers Party, later renamed just the Workers’ Party. This was a strange beast which had emerged from the Official IRA, which declared a ceasefire with Britain as early as 1972 and condemned the IRA and PIRA for their continued physical force, and advocated for working-class unity to end sectarianism in Northern Ireland to allow reunification. On the other hand, they also tried to create a secret branch of members inside RTÉ and were fraternally aligned with the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Despite all this wackiness, the party's Tomás Mac Giolla had a fairly humdrum Eurocommunist ideology. Oh, and 1981 was also the last hurrah of legendary Irish leftist Noël Browne, who won a seat in Dublin North-Central (Haughey’s seat, ironically) for his short-lived Socialist Labour Party.

The one thing more Interesting than all the radical movements springing up, though, was that Fine Gael was actually doing well for itself. Its new leader Garret FitzGerald had modernised the party and made it much more popular, and with Haughey floundering against the resurgent nationalist republican movements and the pessimism over the economy, FG made enormous gains from their 1977 rout. Labour, however, did not, not helped by a dispute between its leader Frank Cluskey and MEP John O’Connell in Dublin South-Central which led to O’Connell winning the seat as an independent and Cluskey failing to get elected, though the general rising tide of other left-wing forces split the vote against it in a similar way to FF being compromised by republican forces.

The upshot of all this was that despite the more favourable boundaries than 1977 and the initial popularity of Haughey, FF lost their majority and had no realistic path to a new one. Consequently, FitzGerald and Labour were able to narrowly string a minority coalition together with the support of Independent (and future Labour) TD Jim Kemmy, but it passed by just three votes with seven abstentions. It probably won’t be surprising to hear the new government would not last long.

(Edit: I mistakenly thought Mac Giolla was the one Workers' Party TD, it was actually Joe Sherlock.)

 

[prime-minister]

I actually also made a bunch more Irish election maps a while back too, so I figured I may as well keep the ball rolling.

*


The February 1982 election is notable for being possibly the only election in history prompted by children’s shoes. The austere January budget of Finance Minister John Bruton proposed VAT be applied to children’s clothing, and the small left-wing parties and independents supporting FitzGerald’s government voted against it. This led FitzGerald to seek a dissolution of the Dáil from the new President Patrick Hillery.

However, Haughey and his front bench made calls to Hillery to request he refuse a dissolution, which would allow FF to return to government without an election. This was completely unconstitutional, and Hillery refused to take the calls, not helped by his fractious relationship with Haughey or the fact Haughey had allegedly threatened his staff.

The dissolution was granted and the campaign began in earnest, and though the controversial behaviour of FF’s leadership and the popularity of FitzGerald helped FG, the government’s austerity and its notably frosty relationship to the upsurge in the Troubles seen the previous year damaged it. Labour were also hurt somewhat by continuing to stand behind FG while the minor left-wing parties stood up to austerity.

Not much changed from 1981, with FF going up to three seats short of a majority while FG lost only two seats and gained voteshare. FG held most of its 1981 gains, Labour held steady and the Worker’s Party took two more seats, with leftist stalwart Proinsias de Rossa entering the Dáil for the first time.

To get back into power, Haughey secured the support of the Workers’ Party TDs and independents Neil Blaney (Haughey’s old bedfellow from the Arms Crisis) and Tony Gregory, an independent socialist from central Dublin who was newly elected but would develop a reputation for speaking out for his impoverished constituents (he refused to wear a tie to the Dáil, he said, because his constituents couldn’t afford them) and got a £50 million deal to support his constituency.

This set the tone for Haughey’s second brief term as Taoiseach, as both in an attempt to keep FF’s popularity with the electorate and to placate the independents giving him a majority, he refused to countenance tax increases or spending cuts for much of it. However, the party’s leadership were growing frustrated with him, particularly in contrast to the slick and popular leadership of FitzGerald.

To make matters worse for FF, the then Attorney General Patrick Connolly got in an embarrassing scandal in August where the murderer Malcolm MacArthur was found on his property while Connolly was in the US. It was discovered that MacArthur was friends with Connolly and alleged that the two were in a homosexual relationship (which was false, but particularly scandalous given that was still illegal in Ireland at the time). Once the scandal became public, Haughey made sure Connolly resigned and called the incident ‘grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented’, with the term ‘GUBU’ becoming both a term associated with Haughey’s government and an occasional nickname for scandals in Irish politics.

FF’s membership were losing confidence in Haughey rapidly, and he faced a motion of no confidence in October which he likely only won because of threats to his dissenters and the demand of him and his supporters that the ballot be open instead of secret. But his government wasn’t saved by this- on the contrary, when a new policy document called ‘The Way Forward’ was published, finally acknowledging FF would enact spending cuts, the left withdrew their support for Haughey. Ireland was facing its third general election in 18 months.

The momentum was at the opposition’s back in the November 1982 election, especially with FitzGerald’s popularity still far above Haughey and Labour’s new (and marvellously named) leader Dick Spring presenting an appealing front in contrast to the controversial leadership of Haughey. FG benefitted a lot from this, coming only 5 seats short of FF’s seat total and winning its highest ever voteshare and second-highest seat total. The opposition finally had enough seats to form a coalition government with an overall majority, and so FitzGerald was able to settle in for a second term that would be much longer than his first.

Something often overlooked about the 1982 election, however, is the Eighth Amendment. This is easy to do when remembering it didn’t pass until the following year, but the strong public opposition to the pro-choice movement in the lead-up to the referendum approving it is notable for causing a handful of Irish leftists, most notably Jim Kemmy in Limerick and future President Michael D. Higgins in Galway West, to lose their seats against the trend at this election. Despite the fairly quiet election campaign, this issue and that of the economy were premonitions of things to come in the coming term…

 

[prime-minister]

FitzGerald’s second and much more lengthy term as Taoiseach was, like his first, marred with economic problems. FG, and particularly Finance Minister Alan Dukes, were aiming to cut public spending and reduce the deficit, but the cuts they made were unsurprisingly very unpopular with the public, especially since they led to unemployment rates worsening. The main reason the coalition survived as long as it did was largely because of FitzGerald and Tánaiste Dick Spring’s positive relationship keeping FG and Labour cooperating.

FitzGerald and Spring were both liberally-minded, but were badly hamstrung during the 1982-87 Dáil due to a mix of the unpopularity of their stances and the government’s broader unpopularity. Most infamously, of course, the Eighth Amendment restricting abortion was approved by referendum in 1983 despite the misgivings of the Irish left (though helped by the government parties not really campaigning to stop it); that amendment would be amended by the 13th and 14th Amendments after the X case in 1992, guaranteeing the right to seek abortions abroad, and finally overturned by the 36th Amendment in 2018.

And of course, there were the Troubles. FitzGerald’s government set up the New Ireland Forum, where non-violent nationalist parties from both sides of the border discussed the possibilities of power sharing in the North and of association between the North and the Republic. Unsurprisingly, the Unionists refused to take part and Thatcher renounced all the Forum’s proposals, basically trying to tar the whole nationalist movement with the brush of the IRA, but the Irish-American lobby managed to pressure Thatcher into at least talking to FitzGerald and John Hume. This ultimately led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, conceding that maybe Ireland should have a role in Northern Ireland if people in Northern Ireland wanted that.

The Agreement was a bit of a boost to FitzGerald’s flagging popularity, helped by Charles Haughey’s insistence that unification was the only solution to the Troubles despite agreeing to alternatives when the Forum was still debating things. Speaking of Haughey, between the discovery of his government’s involvement in phone tapping of journalists (though he was found not to have been involved) and yet another unsuccessful leadership challenge against him in 1983, his popularity in opposition was waning along with FG’s in government.

This culminated in his rival, Desmond O’Malley, declaring he would not oppose the government’s bill to liberalise contraceptive sales even though FF opposed it. This led Haughey to finally kick him out, and in response he and several of his allies formed the Progressive Democrats (PD), a classical liberal party formed in response to the fiscally and socially conservative consensuses among the Irish political establishment. The PDs’ platform was a marked change from this, though ironically it took more from FG’s base than FF’s due to its indifference to Irish nationalism and more orthodox liberalism, in addition to courting the anti-government vote.

With the right of FG using the emergence of the PDs to justify continuing to try to break with Labour, FitzGerald doubled down on his more sympathetic stance by trying to pass a constitutional amendment allowing divorce with Labour’s support in 1986, which was heavily rejected; the campaign against it was supported by Haughey and the Catholic Church. By this point, FF were building up their nationalist credentials again, helped by Haughey’s rivals for the leadership being all but gone, in a stark contrast to FitzGerald trying and failing to reshuffle his cabinet that same year.

Labour finally broke with the government in early 1987 over FG’s budget proposals, and FitzGerald sought a Dáil dissolution. The two main parties were basically taking candy vs vegetables stances on the economy- FG defended the cuts its budget would contain while FF pledged, er, to be FF. Labour didn’t renew its electoral pact with FG, which can’t have inspired confidence in the government’s odds of re-election.

It’s more accurate to say FG lost the 1987 election than FF won it, considering it fell from just two seats behind FF in the Dáil to 30; FF only had enough for 3 seats short of a majority thanks to the PDs’ surge, which is very visible in the first preference by candidate map (and Kemmy and his brother made the PDs top the polls in Limerick East), and got back in largely thanks to the support of Neil Blaney and abstention of Tony Gregory on the vote to make Haughey Taoiseach and the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle. Despite the polls suggesting FF could win a majority, they were instead to form the last single-party minority government seen in Ireland to date.